


Dust Motes

by goldleaf1066



Category: The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (TV)
Genre: Alien anatomy, Jealousy, Other, PWP, Recreational Drug Use, Threesome, just three old dudes doing it and having emotions basically, poly/open relationship, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:20:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26466307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldleaf1066/pseuds/goldleaf1066
Summary: “Were you two close?” skekGra asked, once, stirring broth. UrGoh had thought about it. Possibly. Once.  “Do you think of him?”It’s all very off-hand, and the feathers on the back of his neck are as flat as the horizon so urGoh knows skekGra is either making innocent conversation or is very good at masking his feelings on the topic.“Now,” urGoh admits, “and then.”
Relationships: skekGra/urGoh/urVa (Dark Crystal)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	Dust Motes

**Author's Note:**

> This is... something. If you look closely enough you might even see a glimmer of plot!

**UrGoh**

He’s gotten more whiskery in his dotage, cheeks and lip all soft with silver, but they are both as old as an age of the world and urGoh knows he is no more sprightly than the Archer in more recent, sedentary trine. Still, he notes it, notes all the changes in him after so lengthy an absence. He has lost count of the trine since he has seen a face like his own, a deliberate lack of record-keeping on his part, for the absence of them pains him.

UrVa seems equally unconcerned with schedules, but at least he _could_ be, if he wanted, free to roam as he pleases if not necessarily approved of by their kin in the valley. UrGoh could weep at the sight of him but settles for rubbing their faces together, feeling the tickle of hair and the deep laugh in urVa’s throat as he wrinkles his nose against a sneeze. 

“Were you two close?” skekGra asked, once, stirring broth. UrGoh had thought about it. _Possibly. Once._ “Do you think of him?” 

It’s all very off-hand, and the feathers on the back of his neck are as flat as the horizon so urGoh knows skekGra is either making innocent conversation or is very good at masking his feelings on the topic.

“Now,” urGoh admits, “and then.”

Clearly skekGra wants to ask _when, how often_ , but says nothing more, pouring soup into urGoh’s bowl and offering him a spoon. A joke, one of their nonsenses; neither admits ownership of the cutlery nor remembers from whence it came for they are both incapable of anything other than careful sipping from bowl-edges or lapping like fizzgig. UrGoh has always maintained the urRu predisposition for spindly limbs and bodies is down to Thra’s lack of forethought when constructing their jaws and not that they themselves are wanting in interest in the culinary arts. SkekGra had his opinions on that, too.

He takes the spoon anyway.

Offers it some trine later, to the Archer, who shares their firepit and their soup and as lacking a set of teeth as urGoh, and looks at him like one would at a dear friend much missed but whose eccentricities you’ve been mildly concerned with since the start of it all. 

It didn’t stop urGoh back then. But perhaps it will now. SkekGra looms over urGoh’s shoulder. He can feel both of them either side of him, guarding him in their own particular ways. SkekGra armed with envy against falling back into a suspected old habit. UrVa, feigning chewing in lieu of making conversation, from whatever it is about his union with skekGra he still clearly hasn’t settled with himself.

Not like urVa to be ill at ease. Twitching tail, eyes on the meal. He’s quiet, urGoh thinks, but he was always quiet.

“I can’t say I welcome this news,” he’d said one night as the trees creaked. He’d had enough self-awareness to avoid urGoh’s eye, to look apologetic as he examined the grasses between his feet.

“You of all beings.” UrGoh had fixed him with a look that urVa eventually met, gaze flat, neck curving in some simulacra of submission to look up at the other. The fire between them cast his face in stark and shifting light. 

“Me of all beings.” Three palms unfurling, fingers spread. The fourth took the pipe from urGoh. “Look how it ended for me.”

Tonight, in the loft, urGoh offers the pipe again. 

“It hasn’t ended yet.”

“Indeed.” Then, “SkekGra is jealous.”

UrGoh sighs, sprawling amongst the cushions instead of answering.

“Why?" urVa probes, vapour uncoiling from his nostrils. “Why still?”

“He has asked about us and I have never given him a straight answer. Mystics’ prerogative,” he adds, with a sad humour.

“Afraid he will not take it well?” UrVa tilts his head. 

UrGoh considers this. He’s never really given it more thought than to make sure he pushes it down, away, far from where he keeps the light burning for skekGra in his heart. The one he keeps lit for urVa is smaller but it is still flickering gamely. 

“Or does he wear a coat of a different colour; have I judged you wrong, urGoh? You do not lie with him?”

UrGoh frowns. SkekGra has seen under his tail enough times now to be assured of his very real longing for him, but they have never spoken of monogamy. Never had to, living alone.

UrVa’s laugh is a cloud of smoke.

UrGoh has wondered, far-removed from the situation, if he was before or after skekMal, or all muddled up in the middle. Was he a release, or just familiar? Had urVa craved gentleness or just someone who understood what it was like to be him? The last time he was with urVa was before skekGra. It is odd now, to jump back in time so easily. To run his fingertips along the edge of his jaw, to inhale deeply the scent from the whorls in the hidden parts of him, to feel the weight of him from beneath and the unexpected comfort it brings. He’s heavier than skekGra and has four working hands. He’s hairier elsewhere too. Softer in the middle, his small breasts sag. UrGoh is no different, he knows, not through vanity but a lack of blindness to the passing trines’ imprint across his body. UrVa’s arms, though, are as strong as ever, wiry, lean and safe. He can feel the power in them, imagines the tautness of the muscle as he pulls back the bow string. UrGoh pushes up into him and the moan that urVa leaves to echo in his ear is a sound from long ago, from a cool night where only the stars could gossip over how two particular urRu chose to spend their evening.

It didn’t happen often, but it happened enough times to portion off a corner of urGoh’s heart to the yearning for it in lost little moments. 

He can hear skekGra clattering about below in some effort to hide the fact that he is listening. Perhaps he will invite him up. Run his fingers through the feathers on the back of his head. See how the two he loves most fit together, and whether there is space enough for him between them.

“How long will you stay?”

UrVa is insensible, panting, offers no intelligible answer having rolled off of him into the blankets. One hand rests lightly on urGoh’s hip, grip loosening.

Perhaps tomorrow. 

**SkekGra**

It was a monstrous envy placing its hands on his shoulders and whispering suppositions into his ear from the moment the Archer lumbered into their home with little more than a well-aimed arrow striking the railing of the loft some hours earlier to announce his arrival.

It twisted his guts too, to see urGoh find tasks to occupy his hands near the rear doorway, so to lessen the time between now and when he could fall into urVa’s waiting arms.

Well, skekGra admits, he might have allowed himself to exaggerate the memory, ruffled and throwing glances up at the loft as if an errant arm or tail might droop over the edge and give him the aneurism he so clearly desires. There was no _falling_ , just a gentle greeting of joining hands and words spoken into hidden ears, their long heads held against one another for many moments. 

For much of his more youthful days, he had done nothing but take what was not his but what he knew he deserved, he, the golden child of the skeksis empire. UrGoh had taught him, in his own, quiet way, to give, to be denied and to find joy in it. He looks up at the loft, whose curtains are drawn and from whose gaps in the woodwork he can hear nothing.

Is he to give urGoh away too?

They’ve been quiet for a while, and he doesn’t need anything from up there but he’s at the top of the ramp anyway, talons gripping the curtain-edge so hard they pierce the fabric and dig into his palm.

He looks, and it’s an unexpectedly cold stone that materialises in his belly and sits there, heavy and unwieldy. When he lay there with urGoh in his arms did they look so at ease with one another? Arms and legs and tails in a welter and their two heads next to one another, chests rising and falling gently.

He turns, and the ramp creaks beneath his careless foot. UrGoh stirs, and skekGra watches, frozen, filled with horror, as he opens his eyes and points his head toward the slice of him that must be visible through the drapes. His hand gives him a throb as if to say, though he needs no reminder, that urGoh will have felt the sharpness in the clench of his fist well enough too. 

“You will have to try better than that,” he says, with an affection that hits skekGra like a tide, “if you want to pass unnoticed.”

UrGoh was shy once, still is in odd moments. Too guarded, skekGra thought, in the beginning but he was the same. Unwilling to spill the truth, first about his past and the tragedies his hands had enough role in bringing to pass, and then, later: the good and true yearning for urGoh.

He’d been ashamed of it, of wanting to touch himself in that way. To lie with him, to never let him go. Then urGoh had offered him a hand, much like he is doing now.

“Come,” he is saying, and skekGra’s feet are moving without any agreement from his brain. UrVa mumbles in his sandy sleep, pressed up against urGoh, face hidden in his hair. SkekGra is careful not to touch his tail as he steps over it.

He doesn’t often see urGoh’s tail without its coat – too time-consuming to unravel he would usually leave it on and is unhindered by it during their more arcane evenings. It is dusted along its length with the same grey hair as his mane, the tuft at the end full and thick and looping around itself on the floor near his bare foot, sandals long-since abandoned. SkekGra pauses, his hand an inch from urGoh’s. Both Mystics are naked.

“I suppose I don’t have to guess what you two have been up to.” He bites down the resentment in his statement so hard urGoh must feel the pressure on his tongue too.

UrGoh takes his hand. SkekGra looks at urVa, who is apparently now awake, drawing circles with the tip of a finger against urGoh’s hip. 

“Is it a problem?”

“Is this...-” He looks at urVa again, then back to urGoh. “Is this the best time to be having this conversation?” He sighs, watching urGoh’s slender fingers tighten their grip around his own. “Should we not have had it long ago?”

“I shall leave if you want to have it now.” UrVa has the decency to untuck his head from where it was lodged, his deep voice as ever level in tone and infuriating skekGra by the word. 

No, not infuriation. Something adjacent. 

“UrGoh has said you have no taken no oath together.”

SkekGra clenches his jaw. “This is true.”

“Then it is simple.” He rolls onto his back, leaning on all four elbows in some clever baring of his throat and belly as if to appease skekGra, though everyone in this moment is well aware skekGra is at the disadvantage should either of them wish to topple him; he is far from diminutive by skeksis standards but has the least height and strength of the three. 

“Your problem is not with urGoh,” urVa goes on, making no move to tackle him in any case, “for I smell you on him as clearly as I see you now. So, you either take offense at me specifically, or you want to join in but won’t let yourself. Which is it?”

UrGoh is laughing, very, very quietly. SkekGra snatches his hand away, refusing to accept he has been outfoxed.

“Don’t make a fool of me, Archer,” he snaps, and feels his cheeks heat. If anyone is the fool it is urVa, lying there with his legs akimbo and nothing so much as a blush to cover him. He is bold, perhaps to a fault, but bold. Beautiful too with an eye that pierces him as easily as any of his arrows. In these things he reminds skekGra vividly of the Hunter.

“Fools,” urGoh murmurs, “have a habit of making themselves.” This is evidently all it takes to lift the veil. 

“How can I possibly fit between you?” skekGra grumbles, the fire of his temper burning itself out though not without a scowl at his own shallow reasoning for it all in the first place. Taking umbrage at urVa would mean depriving urGoh of something dear to him, and there is nothing he wouldn’t do to make urGoh happy. Accepting that urGoh can find happiness without him is one of those things.

Thankfully, he is to be included afterall.

It is urVa that makes room for him, yawning, shuffling back, stretching out those impossible limbs. SkekGra, too proud to verbally admit defeat, hauls off his robes and disengages himself from the edifice on his back. UrGoh lies there with a smile on both sides of his face, eyes half-shut, arms reaching and tugging and pulling him as close as they’ve ever been. 

He pushes his face into urGoh’s beard without thinking, so natural it is to fall against him and breath him in, so urGoh does not see the expression on his face when urVa settles back down behind him heavily with chest and belly against his back and tail, resting his head between his neck and shoulder. The Heretic can smell them both on each other.

It would be simpler to unpick this entire development if he wasn’t so aroused, erections already blooming, and his soaking slit concealed between tightly-clamped thighs. He can’t work out which one of them it is that’s causing this. He barely has to look at urGoh normally to feel the tell-tale pulse of need, but it seems he only really has to give urVa a good once-over too.

UrGoh has taken skekGra’s hand from where it had grasped suddenly at his mane and is pressing it against urVa’s thigh. The Archer for his part is nosing under his jaw, one hand meandering over his body. He trails a finger down skekGra’s torso, cups a breast in his palm. UrGoh touches their noses together, curving one hand over urVa’s cheek, pushing another between skekGra’s legs and sliding a long, well-practised finger into his heat.

“Impatient,” he manages, and it’s all he can intelligibly muster for a time. 

“What did you do before me?” he’d asked half-jokingly, in one of their many aftermaths. 

“Nothing,” urGoh had said. They were lying in such a way that skekGra could not see his face. Now he knows that urGoh was lying too.

A second finger wends its way into him. Forgiveness falls from his tongue in wordless sounds, throat working, as they begin to curl, to scissor. He would forgive urGoh anything he confessed as long as he was sitting on that hand when he did so.

They are more similar to one another than he and urGoh will ever be. The same bent back and firm thighs, the same lack of self-consciousness, something he too had shed in the countless trine since he bedded any of his peers in that wretched castle – always on top, always taking, but which falls on him anew like a sudden shroud under the gaze of these two ethereal, fiendish creatures. 

They’re teasing him, he thinks, with their long bodies moving against his and trapping him with their slowly writhing tails and wandering hands. He wants to bury his face between both of their legs and lap them up until dawn. 

**UrVa**

It’s not a habit he indulges is as much as the former Wanderer if the scent that weaves itself as tight as any braid into his hair is a clue, but he takes the hookah when offered each time and lets his thoughts float with smoke up into the eaves to play with the dust motes that hang perpetually above.

This place is covered in _them_ , of course. Their belongings, their projects. Their art, their songs. Their love. It’s as heady as the pipesmoke, their union. The walls ache with it, as the walls of urVa’s heart still echo with the ache of his… _parting_ with his other half. 

Hardly a parting, he has mused, when there was no true joining in the first place. Merely the pain of what could have been and will never come to pass, then. Merely, he thinks, as if it did not wrench him in twain again so that he half expected to wake up with two arms, half a tail. Perhaps it did; seeing urGoh’s doleful face alight with a joy that burns so brightly sends these halves of him spiralling in opposite directions. He is happy, very belatedly, for him, and he mourns for a future destined to be spent watching for shadows in the trees and hoping like a lovesick fool that it is _him_. 

There are two other halves here with their arms open to him, but they don’t fit together quite so well with a third as they do against each other. 

On the second night skekGra fucks him so hard they’ve slid off the blankets and are halfway across the loft floor when his orgasm finally hurls itself through him. He can hear himself crying out, can see, from the corner of his eye, urGoh lying back on the cushions, smoke billowing. It’s not the same; yes, skekGra grapples with him, licks at him hungrily, lets enough of a growl out between this teeth to convince urVa that he really _has_ been repressing some latent need when it comes to him, but not enough for urVa to convince himself these are the Hunter’s teeth, the Hunter’s claws, the Hunter inside him when he closes his eyes and feels the back of his neck throb in a phantom mating bite. He will always be the stranger here, no matter how deeply skekGra thrusts into him, or how tightly urGoh holds him, or how long they doze in a heap together with urVa curled in the centre. _They_ are each other, and they are wonderful and overflowing with love, but he is halved and halved again, and there is no light they can fill him with that will ever knit these slices of the Archer back into the tapestry from which they were rent.

“Is that why you came here?” urGoh asks him. They’re sitting out on the promontory, watching the suns rise as skekGra sleeps it off. Clothes were too much effort; instead they dragged blankets through the dust and sit with them wrapped around their numerous shoulders. “To forget?” He pauses, the notion striking him. “Or to remember?”

“Which answer would please you more?”

UrGoh is making lines in the sand that lies in changeable heaps on the rock surface with his fingers. “It is not about what pleases me.”

UrVa knows some of what pleases urGoh, recalls glimpses of his fingers moving steadily between his midnight thighs as skekGra and the Archer rutted on the floor at his feet, in such bliss the very whorls in his skin seems to pulse with it. 

Earlier, with skekGra’s tail splitting the air like a whip, his jaw wide to avoid incident as he set his temper-quick tongue to urVa’s slit to lick the wetness from it as if dying from thirst, urGoh had worn a similar expression; heavy-lidded, drifting in the miasma of arousal and whatever he has in that hookah, so intensely stoned by the time urVa came that he didn’t respond when his name was the one the Archer howled at the zenith.

Idly he ponders if he tastes so very different from urGoh. Perhaps he will ask the Heretic later, safe in the harbour of another afterglow.

He’s smoking a lot more than he used to, and in another quiet moment between the two of them, skekGra down below in the pools, he winds a braid around one set of fingers, weaves a second with another, and noses into the crown of his head to breathe him in. He smells mostly of warmth, some comforting, innate scent of his own, and pipeweed. The scar there, normally hidden by his hat, is smooth against his nose.

“It’s more than a habit, isn’t it?” urVa muses.

UrGoh, sliding down so his head is in urVa’s lap, closes his eyes. “Concerned about my lungs or my mind?”

“Hmm. Both.”

UrGoh spreads his hind arms to encompass their surroundings. 

“Not much else do to?” urVa surmises.

“You,” urGoh says, pausing to exhale another cloud of smoke, “are a refreshing interlude.”

Only an interlude? UrVa strokes urGoh’s hair until he begins to doze. Of course, he can’t stay here forever. Can he?

Whatever magic urGoh has found with skekGra within these walls he has been willing enough to share, but urVa feels it dilute with every moment. They will grow restive, eventually, eager to continue their exploration of each other without him. He has not seen them together, just the two of them. Has not been given the memory of their bodies aligning. Their own unity something too precious, or too fragile, to be gifted to anyone. 

UrVa understands.

Does skekGra sense the great sadness he drags around with him though the dust and clutter, heavy as his tail? UrGoh knows, urGoh who ushers him into the space between them later when he returns from his own bathing and wraps his arms around him as if it were the first time they had coupled, all new and eager and laughing and wanting nothing more than to touch and keep touching. UrGoh, whom he doubts anyone gave a second glance to, nor called beautiful, until the Heretic. UrVa had thought it but had never opened his mouth. An error.

 _The Heretic_ , he muses, leaning up to rub their heads together; skekGra's hitherto unexplored predilection for Mystics is something he is content to wallow in for some time more. They are not restless yet, do not catch each other’s’ eyes and without speaking ask the best way to suggest that urVa might want to move on. He doubts skekGra would ever try; he seems too wholly bent on giving urGoh whatever he wants, and urGoh too nonconfrontational. UrGoh, running his broad tongue along the underside of urVa’s jaw, and then leaning further and doing the same to skekGra, who reacts not with surprise but with a low purr that rumbles against his back.

Their love for him is but a pale ghost of the depths of feeling they have for one another. It’s a terrible thing, urVa admits, eyes closing as that tongue moves lower, jealousy. It has removed its claws from skekGra and embedded them into him. 

Or are those just skekGra’s talons, holding him firmly between them, unwilling to let go?

**Author's Note:**

> I guess I just really wanted to write these three having some sort of A Time together.
> 
> (Please excuse any errors/repeated words - I can't see the woods for the trees with this any more XD)


End file.
